The Lost Land is REALLY, REALLY Hard to Leave!

Read/Watch 'em In Order #62

When Robert Moore Williams took us back to Lost Land one last time, we find Alan Hunter, Ann Hunter and Jongor still trying to leave and still pursued by Murtos (the monkey people who have become Jongor's arch enemies).

This is from "Jongor Fights Back" (from Fantastic Adventures, December 1951), the last of the trilogy. But one does not simply walk out of Lost Land. They tried that in "The Return of Jongor," and ended up getting involved in a centaur civil war. This time, they get attacked by Murtos who have hired a nine-foot-tall giant to back them up.

It is indicative of Williams' faults as a writer that no origin or explanation for the giant is ever given. This is a being whose existence isn't even hinted at previously, but suddenly Lost Land has at least one (and presumably more) giants.

Also, there's a contrived amnesia sub-plot that takes up part of the book and is used simply to keep Jongor from rescuing Ann too quickly. In addition to this, two more outsiders enter Lost Land looking for super-scientific gizmos that will make them rich. For centuries, the valley goes undiscovered by the outside world, but now fortune hunters (all acting independently of each other) show up every few days.

But I mention the flaws mostly to get them out of the way quickly, because "Jongor Fights Back" is still entertaining. Williams was sloppy in his plot construction, but Jongor, Ann and Alan are all likable characters--with Jongor still getting enough of a personality to differentiate him from Tarzan. Also, Williams does indeed know how to generate excitement and suspense when needed. A sequence in which Ann is lost alone in the jungle is very tense, while the finale (in which Ann and Jongor are about to be sacrificed to a Murto god that is really a super-scientific death ray) is genuinely exciting.

Like the previous two Jongor stories, the brevity of "Jongor Fights Back" is both a blessing and a curse. The flaws don't stand out as much as they would in a novel-length story, but Williams once again stuffs the tale with really cool ideas, then doesn't give himself enough time to expand upon them properly. I actually like the idea of a giant working as a mercenary for the monkey people. BUT WHERE THE HECK DID HE COME FROM? Gee whiz.

That's it for Jongor. Next, I think we'll visit with Jo Gar, a half-Phillipino private detective who starred in a series of stories set in Manila. Written by Raoul Whitfield, they originally appeared in Black Mask magazine and are excellent and unusual examples of hard-boiled fiction. Six of those stories, from 1931, make up a novel titled The Rainbow Murders. We'll be looking at those stories individually.

Dying Centaur Civilization

Read/Watch 'em In Order #59

When the first Jongor novella ended, the titular hero was accompanying Ann and Alex Hunter out of the dinosaur-infested Lost Land back to civilization.

But life is never that straightforward for pulp heroes. "The Return of Jongor" (first published in the April 1944 issue of Fantastic Adventures) quickly sees Ann and Alex captured by Aborigines at the outskirts of Lost Land. Two more men--Schiller and Morton--are also prisoners.

With a little help from a dinosaur, Jongor rescues them all. But further trouble arises when some Murtos attempt to lure Jongor into a trap. The Murtos, remember, are the monkey-people from the previous story--the degenerate remnants of a dying civilization that Jongor destroyed while rescuing Ann. So they are rather upset with our hero and determined to finish him off.

After a kidnapping, an escape and a run-in with a whopping big lion, Ann ends up in the city of the Arklans, a race of centaurs who are also the remnants of a dying civilization. The Lost Land is turning out to be a sort-of dumping ground for moribund pre-human races.

Jongor and his allies act to rescue Ann, but are soon helping Nesca, the queen of the Arklans, escape from assassins. This task is made more difficult by the fact that Nesca doesn't necessarily want to be rescued. Also, Schiller and Morton might not be as trustworthy as their allies would wish them to be.

The same weaknesses inherent in the first Jongor story are still here. Robert Moore Williams is still annoyingly vague in his descriptions of everything. For instance, I still don't know what species of dinosaur Jongor is supposed to be riding. The Arklan city is described in a few short paragraphs, giving us enough information to follow the action but without details that lead us to accept the centaur civilization as something real.

On the other hand, Williams' basic ideas are still pretty cool and the story's brevity continues to hide some of the more egregious faults.

Also, there are several parts that are downright awesome. Ann's single-handed escape from Murtos about halfway through the story is edge-of-your-seat tense, while Nesca's decisions late in the story regarding her personal fate and the fate of her entire race are dripping with surprisingly real emotion.

"The Return of Jongor" has enough good ideas for a solid novel-length story, I think Williams' mistake was writing a novella instead of fleshing out both the plot and the descriptive passages. The story sometimes has the feel of an outline for a more in-depth tale.


All the same, "The Return of Jongor" is entertaining. We'll see if Jongor continues to entertain us when we take a look at Jongor's final adventure.

Dinosaurs, Monkey Men and Super Science

Read/Watch 'em In Order #56

We still have one Captain Future novel in queue as part of the In Order series (as well as two more  Perry Mason movies). Normally, I finish a prose or film series in its entirety before moving on. Of course, in Captain Future's case, I was just covering the first five novels in a much longer series, but the general idea still holds.

So I am now risking anarchy, chaos and the downfall of society by discussing a book out of order. As of the day I'm writing this (about two months before it will post), I have not yet read the fifth Captain Future novel. I have, though, read the first of the three Jongor novels by Robert Moore Williams and abruptly realized they'd be a great addition to the In Order series. Thus, we will look at Jongor of Lost Land, then return to Captain Future one last time, then cover the remaining two Jongor novellettes.

Once again, I realize something like this could bring on the Apocalypse, but I'm willing to take that chance.

Jongor of Lost Land (published in the October 1940 issue of Fantastic Adventures) was one of the many, many, many Tarzan knock-offs that were produced during the 1930s and 1940s, when the Lord of the Jungle was at the peak of his popularity. But being a Tarzan knock-off isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as your Jungle Lord has exciting adventures and is given some notable distinction from the original.

Jongor succeeds in this. He gets his start as a toddler named John Gordon, who pronounces his name Jongor and is awarded this as a nickname by his parents. Getting a Jungle Lord-sounding name is fortuitous when a plane crash strands he and his parents in a remote area of Australia, cut off from the rest of the continent by a range of mountains surrounded by near-impassable deserts.

His parents actually live until he's twelve-years-old, at which point they are eaten by pterodactyls. But Jongor learns to run fast and shoot arrows very quickly and very accurately, so he survives until adulthood.

It's at this point that society girl Ann Hunter enters the valley, looking for her lost twin brother. With Ann is Varsey, a craven coward who is along because he's the last one to see the brother alive, but who will obviously back-stab his own mother to save himself. Less easily understood is the fearless guide Hafner, who seems completely reliable but might just have an agenda of his own.

The trio arrives at the edge of the Lost Land when a disembodied voice urges their native bearers to murder them. Jongor arrives to save them from this and soon after from some hungry pterodactyls. He's not able to do anything, though, when Monkey People fly over in an airship and capture the three outsiders.

The Monkey People are known as the Muros, survivors of a pre-human civilization. They live in an ancient, crumbling city, but have preserved a few bits of their former super-science, such as the airship, a devise that transmits a disembodied voice and a weapon known as the "shaking death" that generates small but powerful tornadoes. Jongor has obtained a bit of their ancient technology for himself--a crystal that allows him to telepathically control dinosaurs.

The Muros want to sacrifice Ann to their sun god, but she gets a chance to make a break for it, then gets rescued again by Jongor. There's a pretty cool fight scene in which the main villain is killed--except it turns out he isn't the main villain after all. Ann and Jongor find Ann's brother, but can not yet escape from the Lost Land. First, they must take action not only to save themselves, but save all of civilization. Fortunately, Jongor comes up with a plan that includes using a dinosaur stampede to attack the ancient city.

No story that includes a dinosaur stampede is all bad. In addition to this, the action scenes are well-written and exciting. And Jongor's origin and personality do differentiate him from Tarzan sufficiently to make him likable in his own right.

What drops Jongor down below the works of writers like Burroughs and Kline is Williams' lack of detail. He just doesn't bother describing things. For instance, Jongor spends some of the story riding a dinosaur, but the creature is only vaguely described. I got the impression that is was a triceratops or another species of ceratopsian. But you can see in the images above what J. Allen St. John came up with for the cover and what the interior artist came up with for his version. Any of these images could fit Williams' sketchy description.

This lack of detail hurts the most when he introduces the Muros. When Burroughs tosses us into a lost civilization, he always gives us enough detail and coherent internal logic to make us believe it really exists. Moore, though, tells us almost nothing about the Muros other than they perform human sacrifice. There's just not enough detail to flesh them out to believable proportions.

That's a big flaw, but Jongor is helped along by its short length--its faults would have been much more in-your-face over the course of a full-length novel. It's a fun read, despite its shortcomings. So we'll be returning to the Lost Land for the two sequels. Like I said, any story that includes a dinosaur stampede is worth a visit.